Exploring history and place in the Volunteer State

Sneed Acres Farm in Brentwood

Sneed Acres Farm on Old Smyrna Road in Brentwood has been known to me for about 20 years when Vance Little first emphasized the significance of the farms along the old road and then my graduate student Mary Allison Haynie conducted her county-wide survey of historic rock walls in Williamson County a few years later.

Yesterday, the family invited us to visit the property and to start discussions of its long overdue listing as a Tennessee Century Farm. As Mary Allison had reported the farm has a remarkable set of stone walls dividing the farm from the road but also dividing fields.

The barns are ingenious adaptations of earlier 19th century structures into the almost standardized look of Tennessee barns from the progressive era of the early twentieth century. Presently the farm fields livestock: swine, cattle, horses and rich pastures are everywhere.

The farmhouse too is an ingenious update of Tennessee’s Frontier Revival period in domestic architecture, finished in 1977. The earlier c. 1796 log house is exposed on the inside but the exterior has that more finished contemporary look of the revival.

The family cemetery is among the county’s oldest and contains slave burials and the graves of War of 1812 and Civil War veterans. We are just getting this new Center for Historic Preservation project underway, with the hard work coming this fall but certainly Sneed Acres Farm will be a distinguished addition to the Tennessee Century Farms program.